Kindle Paperwhite 2014 Edition Review

[admin]

Hello EDCF ! I’ve been following the forums without an account for a while and now I’ve decided to join and contribute myself so I hope this review will actually help you decide if the Kindle Paperwhite is for you  (Disclaimer at the bottom)

I’ve been on the fence about buying an eBook reader for a few months. I looked at a lot of them, I read a lot of reviews and 6 weeks ago I was in a store in Bucharest checking out a Kindle Paperwhite eBook reader: At first I thought I was holding some kind of a promotional material that was an empty Kindle case with a piece of paper behind the plastic screen, but no, it was the actual Kindle and it looked awsome.

One week later, I decided I had to do it, so I ordered a Kindle Paperwhite 2014 WiFi Edition and it arrived a few days later. I quickly unboxed it and I have to say the quality of the package is definately higher than anything I’ve ever unboxed before. The Kindle comes with a high quality USB cable, but no wall plug, which in the end isn’t that big of a deal because most of us have a lot of those hanging around anyway.

The setup process requires you to login/create an Amazon account and insert some data about yourself, but after a few minutes you’re ready to go. You have 4GB of internal space which should be enough, but if it is not, you have plenty more space in the cloud. You can access the Amazon store to buy some books, or you can connect your Kindle to your computer and painlessly upload books via the USB cable. Another neat feature of the Kindle is that it creates an email adress for you and you can send books via email as attachments, a feature that makes it that much easier to start reading your favourite books immediately.

To be honest, I’m not really a fan of the Amazon Store since prices tend to be a bit high, especially for people outside of the USA(Amazon adds a tax for all the books bought from outside the USA), but that’s not a problem since you can find pretty much any book by simply searching for it on Google. Once you upload your books, they will show up in your library and you can start reading.

The reading experience is incredible, the text is crisp, contrast is good and the adjustable back-light really helps when you’re reading in low light enviroments. You can adjust the font face and the font size and there’s also a landscape reading mode that’s enabled through the menu and not by simply rotating the device. At the bottom of the screen you can see your location in the book, the progress in percentage and estimated reading time left in the chapter/book. Also, at any time, you can press, hold and drag over any words in the book and you can add notes or highlight the selected text.

A feature that really improved the overall reading experience for me is the included dictionary that can be accessed even offline. It helped a lot because English is not my main language and I can look up any word in a matter of seconds. You can upload your own dictionaries just like you upload books and there’s a bunch of them available.

Battery life is another important feature of this device and it definately blew all my expectations. The battery came about half charged and I had to recharge after a few days. It takes about 2 to 3 hours to fully charge the Paperwhite, but I managed to squeeze 3 weeks of daily reading from the first charge by keeping the device in airplane mode.

There are some flaws with the Kindle aswell and the biggest one is the missing audio output, a great reading device should allow you to enjoy your books in all the available formats and I’m not sure why the Kindle Paperwhite doesn’t have audio output while other Kindles do and Amazon actually sells some audio books, they should really rethink that.

In the end, I’d like to point out that I usually can’t read a real book without my glasses, which is not the case with the Kindle Paperwhite. I love my Kindle because it does what it is supposed to do: it display books, no other useless features, no Facebook integration, no distractions and because it is so small and durable, it quickly became a top item on my EDC list, since I can stuff it anywhere, in my jacket, in my backpack or even in my jeans. It is simple to use and it gets the job done. I can’t even remember how many times in these 5 weeks the Kindle helped me pass the time in a queue or while I was waiting for the bus.

** Disclaimer: This is my first written review of an item and English is not my first language so if there are any big mistakes in the text, or you would like me to add anything to it, please let me know.

[Author]

Posts